Saturday, 30 September 2017

Racing the Wind

From the crest of the ridge, the valley is
like a crumpled tablecloth spread below us, sprinkled with trees and houses.

Far away, looking little more than a stain
in the air, the mountains on the far side of the valley rear towards the sky. I
had been there yesterday, with the others, checking the topography, each of us
marking out the route we’d take, planning out the way to win.

It takes a lot of planning and plotting,
this sport, more than the actual time spent in the game.

The referees are coming around, to check on
equipment. The one who approaches me stands for a moment, staring, as I’d known
he’d do, before he bends to check on harness clasps and straps.

“All fine?”

He nods silently, and then motions to my
helmet. I strap on the bright yellow plastic shell. All the helmets are
numbered and colour coded. I’m number nineteen; to my right number thirty two
is fumbling with his white helmet, while on the other side is number five, in
red. He’s joking with the referee, and the man, who wouldn’t say a word to me,
is joking and grinning right back.

The Chief Referee, with his green cap,
comes up. “Gentlemen,” he announces, and glances at me. “And lady.”

I hear a faint titter from somewhere.
Again, I’d expected this. It isn’t easy being a woman in this man’s sport. It’s
only been a few months that we even got the right to compete, and even now
there are hardly any of us in the top league.

One of the reasons that there are hardly
any of us in the top league is that we don’t get any sponsorship to speak of. I
have saved all I could for a year for this.

“Gentlemen,” the Chief Referee repeats, “and
lady. Your attention, please.” We pause in our fumbling at our equipment to
look at him. “You have drawn lots for your starting positions, and you know the
rules. Drones will be accompanying you. Make sure your cameras are turned on.
We wish you good luck, and may the best man win.” There’s a moment’s
hesitation, and he glances at me. “Or woman, of course.”

There’s that titter again, and I’m almost
certain it’s from thirty two, who’s behind me. I remember him from earlier,
when we were drawing lots. He had been complaining loudly that ranking and
experience should decide the starting order, not the draw of lots. He’d
especially been disgusted when he’d come in behind me, the woman on her first
competition.

We begin to shuffle into line. I’m next to
last, of course – my luck isn’t that
good – but there’s at least number thirty two behind me. It’s hard walking with
the harness and the equipment hanging down our backs like a bat’s wings. The
morning sun hasn’t warmed the air yet, and my breath hangs before my nose in a
little cloud.

“Priyanka,” my coach had said, “remember
that you don’t have to win this. You just have to compete, to make your mark.
Don’t take risks.”

“I won’t,” I’d said, though we’d both known
this was ridiculous. Just taking part in this sport is all risk. And if I play safe, hang back, and lose without putting
in an effort, it’s just going to tell everyone that women can’t compete, they
can’t be taken seriously. And I can’t possibly do this without somebody helping
pay the bills. Better equipment, too, and a better coach as well.

A whistle goes off. I can’t see the head of
the line, but they’ll be dropping off the ridge now, one by one, as fast behind
each other as the referees will let them. Glancing up, I can see a drone,
hovering on shimmering propellers, watching. It and others will be with us all
the way.

That’s all they will be doing, watching. It’s
not that they’ll step in when things get rough. As they will.

Belatedly, remembering just in time, I reach
up to the top of my helmet and turn on my camera. If I had one of the new,
expensive helmets, I could have the option of projecting the footage on the
inside of my faceplate, telling me when to turn my head to get the best footage
to please the advertisers and television networks. But my helmet doesn’t even
have a faceplate; I peer at the world through rubber-framed goggles clamped
over my eyes, like a snorkeller’s mask.

The line’s moving faster and faster, and
suddenly there are just three in front of me. A bright blue helmet flashes,
catching a stray beam of sunlight, and disappears over the edge. The launch
referee, hand raised, is peering over the edge. He turns, his hand comes down,
sharp, and the next helmet – black as midnight, the number three briefly
visible – disappears. Then it’s number five, in the red helmet. I’m so close to
him that I can see the material shift and twist as his limbs tense under the
apparatus. And then, like a bubble pricking, he’s gone.

For a moment, I flash back to the first
time I’d ever done this, flown solo. I’d stood on a launch platform, tense with
terror though I’d been on enough training tandem dives to know what it would
feel like. Like that moment, when I’d stood poised on the edge, I feel suddenly
as though I’m not ready for this, that I’ll never be ready. But I have to be. I
can’t turn back now. It’s not just the fact that I’d lose everything; I
literally can’t turn back without disrupting the launch schedule and delaying
number thirty two, behind me. Baki, I remember his name now. It’s Baki. I flex
my knees, pull my harness cords.

The referee’s hand drops sharply, his head
turning. “Go!”

The ground drops out under me. One moment I’m
stuck to the rock by the soles of my boots, as much so as any of the stones
around. The next, I am falling through the air like a pebble thrown by a child.

As a child, long ago, I used to have a
recurrent dream, one that was so frequent that I used to lie awake fighting off
sleep in case I had it again. In this dream it was night, under a sky without
moon and stars, in a city without lights. There were only immensely tall
buildings, so close together that the streets between them were little more
than alleys.

The dream was always the same. I was
falling down the face of one of these buildings, past rows of blank dark
windows. I never knew if I’d fallen or I’d been thrown off the roof or jumped,
all I knew was that I was falling, that I could feel myself falling, and that
in a moment my life would be over before it had even properly begun. And then,
just before I hit the ground, I would wake up.

And so it is now. I’m again falling, past
the cliff-face, and though it’s rock and not brick and plaster, and it’s broad
daylight, it’s just the same. Only this time, I can do something about it.

I pull on the harness cords, and my folded
wings spread with a snap, taking my arms and legs with them. Suddenly I’m no
longer falling. Suddenly, I’m a bird, not a stone.

Now. The wind catches me, slaps against the
bottoms of my wings, and I’m swooping past the rocks, rushing past them faster
and faster, and then I pull back my arms at the right instant and I’m rising,
lifting away from the rock studded slope. I’m flying.

I have often wondered if I would ever have
taken up this sport but for that dream. Maybe if I can fly enough times, I can
exorcise it. And then, maybe, I will never want to do this again.

But that is something that may or may not
happen in the future. Right now I am here, and I am flying.

My equipment, like my helmet, isn’t of the
same grade the others have. I had to buy what I could afford, and it’s just
barely of competition standard. My wings are smaller than the others, and the section
between my legs ends at my feet. I do not have the spread tail the others have, to lift and manoeuvre
with.

On the other hand I’m smaller and lighter,
and I know my wings. I know they can do what I order them to do.

Below me, the beginning of the valley is a
tortured jumble of rock and scrub, and at the speed at which I’m flying it’s
just a blur. If I hit that stone now I’d be a smear. I resist the temptation to
pull up further, knowing I’m at a safe height and that rising will rob me of
lift and speed. I can’t afford to stall and fall out of the air.

There’s one last ripple of ridge below me,
like a frozen wave, and as I rush past it the valley is open below me, green
and beautiful and inviting. I have no time to think of it.

Below me, the air is dotted with the
bat-like, brightly coloured specks of the other flyers. I’m too far away to
make out who’s who, and at this point it no longer matters anyway. Right now
all that matters is flying as fast as I can.

Even through my helmet I can hear the wind
rushing by, and it’s buffeting my face and nose so hard it’s difficult to
breathe. By turning my head to the sides I might snatch a few extra breaths,
but I have long since learnt not to do that. At this speed, spread-eagled and
tied to my wings, turning my head back and forth could change my direction, and
I can’t afford that. Not even the slightest bit.

A shadow falls over my face, and for a
moment I wonder if it’s one of the others, if I’ve overtaken someone already.
But that’s ridiculous. There will be no overtaking here, not out in the open. That
will only happen when we’re in the mountains on the far side.

It’s a drone. The thing drops to my
altitude, effortlessly faster than me on its many whirring propellers, and spins
so the black round eye of one of its cameras is pointing at my face. I can
imagine the feed going out on television, the studio commentators – not one of
whom has ever strapped on a wing – talking about the lone woman competitor and
how this is a breakthrough for her, even though the bookies don’t think much of
her chances.

It’s distracting and intensely annoying,
but there’s nothing I can do about it; the competition rules say the organisers
can take and use any media footage they desire. My coach would tell me to
maximise the opportunity for publicity, to look up at the camera and smile,
show them as much of my face as they can see past my goggles. Instead, I look
down, at the valley floor rushing by. If asked by my coach later I’ll say that
I was checking for height clearance and whether I should try to gain altitude,
but, really, I’m safe. I just don’t want to feel like a piece of meat on the
block. Not one of the others will have a drone staring into their faces – or if
they do, they’ll be enjoying it and making use of it for all they’re worth. You
can be sure of that. I look up again, and the drone is gone.

Right then. For the moment all I have to
concentrate on is not letting my airspeed drop off too much. I can’t get too
slow, or I’ll never make the other side.

There’s a dip in the ground below, a long channel
in the valley, and I dip my wings to pick up speed, hurtling over the ground,
slashing by over a road, lorries and cars blurring by below, white and red
houses a blue to the right. Now the ground is rising again, and my increased
velocity carries me upwards, up towards the craggy rocks on the other side.

“Why did you ever choose such a dangerous
sport?” I’ve been asked this more times than I can remember. “Don’t you know
how lethal it is?”

“What else can I play?” I could have
answered reasonably, and I used to. “I can’t run, I can’t throw things any
distance, and I can’t kick a ball to save my life. I can’t plan a chess move if
the fate of the world depended on it, and I can’t tell one card game from
another. What do you want me to do?”

These days I just smile. “Maybe I’ve got a
death wish,” I say sweetly.

“You ought to get married and settle down,”
I keep being told.

“Maybe,” I reply. “But I don’t have that much of a death wish.”

I still remember the first time I’d seen
the wings on television. It was when I was in school, unhappy and friendless,
bullied because I was too studious, not studious enough, the teacher’s pet, the
teacher’s hate object, too ugly, too pretty. Nothing I could do was right. And
then I saw the wings, bright blue, green, yellow, and red, and at that moment I
knew that this was what I was waiting for.

I didn’t know, of course, just how lethal
the sport was, especially at the competition level. Even if I’d known, it would
not have made a difference. I was hooked.

A blur of motion in the corner of my
restricted, goggle-vision startles me out of my thoughts. I see it a moment
before it vanishes, a spire of stone like a finger pointing at the heavens. I’d
marked out this finger on my map, and when the time has come I’ve been so busy
dreaming about the past that I almost missed it.

Here, now. The valley is ending, the
mountains of the other side coming up, the point at which the race really begins. I can no longer waste
time thinking. From this point on, it’ll be hard work, and luck, all the way.

The slopes are rising again, fast, the
mountains a wall of rock before us, too high to fly over. I catch a glimpse of
one, two, three, glittering bat-like figures to the right, sliding through the
air. They’ll be making for the main pass, depending on it to get to the finish
line. The pass is broad enough for them to manoeuvre, and has enough twists and
turns for them to try and outfly one another.

I have other plans. With my small wings, in the narrow confines of the pass, I
have no chance.

Dipping my left wing, I slip into a hard
turn, through the shadow of the finger, the wall of rock to my right. Ever since
I saw the cleft in the rock, yesterday, I’ve been planning this; I’ve gone over
it so many times in my mind last evening that I’ve done it in my dreams.

The plan was simple. Everyone else would go
for the main pass, or perhaps one or two would fly on to the spot where the two
arms of the mountain ridge joined at an obtuse angle, and there was a point
that a fast-flying wing might be able to get over. I could never manage that;
my small apparatus could never lift me that high.

But there was the cleft on the other side,
little more than a fissure in the mountainside. It was longer, too long for the
professionals to bother with, and in it I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone
else. I could just concentrate on staying in the air, as fast and as high as I
could.

But in plans everything goes perfectly.
Reality is another animal.

Here’s the cleft, coming up, and I turn
right, hard, as hard as I can, knowing that if I miss the crack I will become a
smashed ruin on the rock surface, knowing also that if I turn too hard I’ll
lose lift and stall. It looks as though I won’t make it, and I wrench hard, as
hard as I can, on my left wing, and suddenly I’m through.

It’s a narrow space, the walls blurring by
on both sides, and I’ll never get any lift from air currents here. There won’t
be any room for mistakes, but if I can just concentrate on flying, I should be
fine.

Wrong. I am not the only one to think of
the crack.

At first, when I see the shadow on the rock
below, I think it’s my own. But the angle is wrong, it’s much too high, and
there’s my shadow, right where it should be. Then I think it’s a drone, but it’s
far too large for a drone, and the way it’s flying, that isn’t like a drone, at
all.

And then I know. It’s someone else, someone
who’s chosen the same rock fissure as I have, someone who’s followed me in
here. And, given my position as last but one in the line, there’s only one
person it could be.

If I could have heard anything through my
helmet and the slipstream roaring past my face, I might have heard him snigger.
He knows that the fissure is too narrow for him to pass me, unless he can fly
higher, and he can’t fly higher because there is no way to gain height in this
narrow, windless space.

I know what he’s going to do. He’s going to
try and get rid of me.

How will he do it? If he’s armed, I’m dead,
no matter what I do. But there’s no reason he would take along the extra weight
of a weapon – he can’t have known that I would be going alone into the fissure,
not out into the pass with the others – and the referees would have noticed it.
Besides, a bullet hole will be hard to explain away, and in any case a drone
may be watching. And the camera feed from his helmet will show what he does.

That limits his options, but doesn’t
eliminate them. He’s more experienced, and, more importantly, he’s got a much
larger wing. So...I clench my fists momentarily as I realise what he’s going to
do.

He’s going to rush me, get as close to me
as possible, and use the downdraft from his huge wing to push me down onto the
rock. It’ll work, too. There may be suspicion, but that’s all. Nobody will be
able to prove it wasn’t an accident.

I’ve heard of this happening before, flyers
sabotaging each other, deliberately crossing each other’s paths to force them
to stall or turn away and lose time. But those have been gamesmanship, not
attempts at murder; and, anyway, I have never expected it to happen to me.

I can’t see Baki yet, he’s still behind me
and slightly above. He probably doesn’t know yet that I’ve spotted his shadow,
that I know he’s there. I have to use this while I can.

My jaws are clenched so tight that I force
them to relax, while I try to think. Yesterday, when we’d come over here on the
official inspection, the others had concentrated on the pass, while I’d come
back to this fissure. I try to remember whether Baki had come back as well. I
can’t remember seeing anyone else.

Therefore, he must have made up his mind
afterwards, and that meant he probably doesn’t know the fissure as well as I
do. That’s my only advantage. I must use it.

Ahead, past a bend to the right, the
fissure narrows sharply, and that’s where he’ll make his move. I’ll have no
space to dodge, no way to escape. But there’s something I know that he doesn’t.

Just past the bend, the fissure splits. One
side, which is actually wider, and looks like the natural extension of the main
cleft, goes straight on. But it’s a dead end, and terminates in a flat wall of
rock in a couple of hundred metres. The smaller passage, to the right, is the
way to go.

He’s probably following my lead, waiting
for the right time, and this has to be what I’m going to make use of. I don’t
have time to think longer, or hesitate.

Sweeping into the bend, right wing dipping
slightly, I note, out of the corner of my eye, his shadow on the rock. It’s
closer, but not yet too close. I may just have enough time.

Now. There’s the straight passage ahead,
and I fly towards it, and I feel him following, the first down pressure of his
coming pressing down on my wing surface. He’s busy calculating at exactly what
point he’ll press in on me and send me down like a sparrow with a broken wing.

But I’m lighter than he is, and my wing is
smaller. I can turn more sharply than he can.

And that is what I do. At the very last
moment, I drop my right wing and wrench myself as sharply to the right as I can.
I have a nightmare glimpse of the rock, so close that I can feel it kiss my
toes, and then I’m round, I’m turned, and the passage to the right is open
before me.

I turn my head, risking a look, just in
time to see the bat-shape of his wing vanish into the dead end. There’s no way
he can turn round in there. He’ll have to get down or crash into the rock, and
either way, he’s lost. I can imagine his baffled fury, but I have no time to
worry about his fate.

Here is the narrow part of the passage, and
I’ve lost too much speed, too much altitude in my twisting and turning; I can’t
fly on at this height or I’ll crash. There’s just one thing left to do – dive.

The air is like a wall against my face,
battering against my cheeks and teeth. The rock of the fissure floor is so
close that I might be able to touch it if I stretch, but I’m going faster now,
fast enough, and I risk pulling up my wing leading edge. Slowly, I’m gaining
height.

Little by little, metre by metre, I claw
back some of the altitude I’ve lost. I have to turn again, now, once more time,
and suddenly the fissure is done. I’m in the open air, over a gentle slope, and
there’s the finishing line, below.

Of course I’m not the winner. The ground is
already littered with parachutes. I’m still too low and too fast to risk it,
and I swoop overhead, away over the slope, and turn round again, coming back,
and pull the ripcord.

There’s the familiar jerk and the snap of
the opening canopy in my ears, and I’m dropping, down towards the ground,
people looking up at me and a couple moving away from my descent path, the
ground coming up and slamming my boots.

I’m down. I’ve survived.

My coach comes up to me and helps free me
from my equipment. “Not bad,” he says. “Thirteenth of those to finish. They’re
still coming in.”

I want to tell him about Baki, and decide
not to. “Thirteenth,” I say. “Is that unlucky?”

“Not for you. You’ve made the qualification
for the Typhoon race.”

I think of what I’ve heard of the Typhoon
race. It’s in an deserted city, between skyscrapers so close together that one
can’t fly straight longer than a hundred or so metres. And any accident means a
fall down to the cracked surface of the streets far below, dotted with the
rusting wreckage of abandoned cars.

Or perhaps the city is only supposedly
deserted. I’ve heard tales that gangs live in the basements of the crumbling
skyscrapers, and are not above shooting at the wings as they speed by. It’s
rumoured that the organisers know it, too, and hope that someday a flyer is
gorily shot down on television so they can get good ratings.

“Do I have to?” I ask.

“I thought you wanted to get recognised at
this,” he says.

I think of Baki, somewhere in the mountain,
who’d planned to eliminate me in order to win. I think of feral gangs with
rifles shooting up at me. And then I think about a dream of falling down a dark
building, and how I have been spending my life trying to get over that.

Bill,Welcome back my old friend.So happy your health has improved enough for you to post again.Very good story today. Yes, I also felt I was flying with this woman. Very realistic descriptions in your works.Let us know when your book will be available, please.

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